Fedora Magazine: FCAIC in the House, part II

As you may remember from part I, I became the cake-man (that’s FCAIC or Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator) about three months ago. It has been an exciting adventure moving from an engineering role into one where I work as a kind of “Community Manager” or “Community Lead” that thinks about users and contributors as mechanics of keeping the project running smoothly. I’m writing today to update you on what I’ve been working on relative to my goals and to invite you to help me make it all even better. I’d also like to share some ideas about where to go from here.

How’d I do?

Get to know the community

As I mentioned before, this is a never-ending goal. I keep meeting amazing people focused on areas of the project which were not on my contribution radar before I became FCAIC. Passionate, intelligent and helpful people with real insights and experience have helped me so much in my first few months. I look forward to continuing to rely on them and hope that my contributions back have been helpful to them too.

As part of this goal I attended both FUDCon LATAM and FUDCon APAC. These two events were held at local universities in Puno, Peru and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It was great to see how our contributors break down Fedora for these kinds of audiences. I also learned a lot about LATAM and APAC and how they fit into Fedora. As an American living in the Czech Republic I had a fairly good appreciation for NA and EMEA and I was glad to expand my knowledge.

I’ve discovered there are some challenges in all of our regions and that we need to make sure we are doing the right things. Some of it is just resourcing and some of it is working through culture on all sides to get people talking.

In the next few months I will be at DevConf.cz and FOSDEM. Fedora will have a strong presence at both conferences and I am looking forward to interacting with our Ambassadors and other attending contributors. I will be focused on several activities, including contributing to the Diversity FAD taking place during DevConf.cz and other meetings around Fedora topics. At FOSDEM I have the fantastic opportunity to help make the Distributions devroom happen with the world-famous Brian Stinson from CentOS.

If you’re going to be near me, let me know so we can meet and say “hello.” I’ll endeavor to keep my travel schedule on the Fedora vacation calendar so you can find me when I’m not at home.

I am sure we have a lot of lessons to discover as we move through this fiscal year, but I am very excited about having data on demand and being able to move the conversation forward from discussing numbers to discussing impact. Together we can make this process seamless and a model for other organizations that want to be transparent about their finances.

I am also working with the Council on our reimbursement policies and methods and looking at ways to improve our use of sponsored travel.

Interested in helping out? Feel free to contact me right now. On the technical side, I’d love some help from folks interested in Ruby, AsciiDoc, Jenkins, testing (CI – Continuous Integration) and automated deployments (CD – Continuous Deployment). On the policy and procedure side, let me know about ideas and help me draft a great way forward for us. This is a great project for new contributors and junior coders or system administrators.

FOSCo (and FAmSCo)

The Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee (FAmSCo) has just recently had an election welcoming in lots of new members. We didn’t accomplish the goals related to creating an Outreach Steering Committee (FOSCo), but that’s OK. Working with the members of the previous FAmSCo has taught me a lot about Ambassadors. I am excited to work with the new FAmSCo to support them as they look at ways to make our Ambassadors program stronger.

Fedora Docs publishing

Our documentation reboot work continues. The documentation team has decided to move to AsciiDoc and modular writing.

We haven’t fully resolved the tooling, so there are still at least two proposals in motion. I am working on a proposal to use AsciiBinder as our main docs engine for the next few releases. I’ve been talking to the upstream and they are excited by the project. I’ve been shamelessly using my work on the budget website to help model this.

There is also some exciting work going on in figuring out modular writing with work being driven by several folks, including Shaun McCance and Petr Bokoc. What is modular writing? It is a way of putting together discrete text into larger units that answer user stories. Confused? You won’t be after reading this fantastic explanation by Petr.

I’m still working toward my personal goal of us having a new publication solution by Fedora 26.

Interested in helping out? Get involved with the Docs Project or feel free to contact me right now. On the technical side, I’d love some help from folks interested in format conversions (DocBook->AsciiDoc – think perl, python, bash, etc.), ruby, AsciiDoc, Jenkins, testing (CI – Continuous Integration) and automated deployments (CD – Continuous Deployment). We also need help on the writing side with modular writing and general updates.

What’s next?

So my four goals from last quarter are still ongoing efforts. That’s cool, some, like getting to know the community will hopefully never end! To these goals, I am adding:

Events

Flock 2017 bidding has opened and I am looking forward to helping make that event happen. If you’re in North America, get your bids in now!

I’ve started a pair of conversations on the council-discuss mailing list about Flock and FUDCon. We have lots of opportunities and we need to figure out how to best use our people and resources to accomplish our goals. Please join in and let everyone know how we can make our events work even better for us in the future.

Packaging

No major initiatives here, my interest here is personally focused. The situation is that I have never packaged anything in Fedora before. That is a huge area of activity for us, so I am putting together my first package submission, bringing DayJournal to Fedora. I’ve been receiving amazing feedback from Igor Gnatenko and Neal Gompa in my packaging ticket and I hope to reach completion and approval soon.

So there you have it. Let me know if I’ve missed anything. Let me know if you have input into what I’m doing or want to help. And by all means let me know what we can work on together. I can’t do it all alone (and I don’t want too!) and I can’t even help with everything I want to, but I want to make sure my work is helping the community move forward.